...for 'hitman' Paul Schumann

Paul Schumann as he follows the advice of Reggie Morgan to 'get out of here' after the shooting in the Dresden Alley, comes across Hitler’s SA Stormtroopers - the Brown Shirts – attacking a Jewish shopkeeper.

Worst of all the man sells books. Books which include those by the brother of banned author Heinrich Mann. The Brown Shirts are intent on the destruction of the premises and brutalising the man and his wife. Except Paul has no qualms in resisting, confronting and forcibly restraining their attackers.

He did not know it, but for doing that he could have been killed, killed on the streets of Berlin by Hitler's thugs. It is only through the ingenuity of Otto Webber, a black-marketeer, that he escapes the determined hue and cry that follows.

...for policeman Willi Kohl

Willi Kohl, when he later interviews the Brown Shirts whom Paul assaulted, is looking for a clear description of their assailant. The one track mind of the SA men can only see the perpetrator as one of those who harm their country – a Jew - and they offer a description taken straight from the racial propaganda of the time.

                                           "He had a huge nose and fleshy jowls…Bushy eyebrows."
                                           "And bulbous lips… "
                                           "He was quite fat… A Jew."
                                           "Clearly he was a Jew, yes."

None of which fits any description of Paul Schumann but does accord with the caricature of their object of hatred. Nonetheless Willi Kohl gleans what he can from the men. The police investigation proceeds while Paul’s plans continue to unfold, all set against the backdrop of a Germany and its citizens under Nazi rule.

We want it all…

Hitler came to power in 1933. For him, building the Third Reich, building on the purity of the Aryan race, meant weeding out the undesirables; by far the largest population of those was the Jews, a group demonised in the past and for whom there was pressure to roll back the emancipation of the 1800’s.

Propaganda would portray them as grasping moneylenders, financiers and businessmen who grew wealthy while the German people suffered economic hardship, and lurid tales of their dark practices would be told on the streets. Directives would be promulgated that would first inhibit, then curtail, then cripple and finally remove completely from Jewish ownership every business. Progressively, individuals would be barred from working in the civil service, from their professions, from managing an enterprise, from working alongside Germans. Jews would end up marked out, by the forced addition to their name of Israel for men and Sara for women, by the J stamped in their passport, by the yellow star worn on their arm. They would be required to provide a list of assets, that would then be taxed, then appropriated. The ultimate intention was to remove Jews from citizenship and civil society – to remove them from German territory. And it all worked. By 1938, the number of Jewish businesses had been reduced from 100,000 to 40,000 and one third of the 500,000 German Jews had fled the country. Those that remained were stripped of German citizenship and suffered even more - more privations, more intimidation and more violence.

Month after month, directive after directive was issued, even one forbidding Jews to fly the German flag. Failure to comply led to punishments of increasing harshness as the regime moved relentlessly toward the final solution of the Jewish issue.

A successful Jewess was denounced for failing to have the name Sara included on her nameplate where she was living, and retaining the title Dr which was forbidden to Jews. Taken into custody for that crime, Lilli Jahn was sentenced to imprisonment in a forced labour camp and six months later transferred to Auschwitz and her death.

Sample directives

1933
April 7            Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service
                        - Jews barred from German civil service and judicial positions.
April 22          Law dismissing "non-Aryans" from German hospitals & health centres.
                       - Jewish medical doctors, pharmacists, dentists and technicians barred
April 25          Law Preventing Overcrowding in German Schools and colleges.
                      -  admittance for "non-Aryans" capped at 1.5 percent
                                           ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1938
April 22         Decree against the Camouflage of Jewish Firms
                       - forbids changing the names of Jewish-owned businesses.
April 26         Order for the Disclosure of Jewish Assets
                      -  requires Jews to report all property in excess of 5,000 reichsmarks.
October 3       Decree on the Confiscation of Jewish Property
                       - regulates the transfer of assets from Jews to non-Jewish Germans.
November 12 Decree on the Exclusion of Jews from German Economic Life
                       - closes all Jewish-owned businesses.
November 28 Decree from Reich Ministry of Interior
                       - restricts the freedom of movement of Jews.
1939
February 21    Decree Concerning the Surrender of Precious Metals and Stones in Jewish Ownership.

The MasterRace

Alongside such strictures on Jews was the Nazi pursuit of the pure Aryan society – procreation was to be encouraged but forbidden with ‘mongrels’ and other inferior racial types. Families had a duty to the state to have several children and women were given special recognition where they had four or more. Make up, skirt length, hair style, even such incidentals were defined for the ideal Aryan woman. Healthy living was important – as was a healthy mind. Only sound German influences were to be tolerated – the decadence of the Weimar republic was outlawed. Books by authors from Hemingway to Einstein were banned as seditious or the work of degenerates and burnt in their thousands. Good German composers and their music were to be preferred to negro inspired Jazz. And the youth of the country were to be instilled with the values of the Reich, loyalty to Hitler and sworn hatred of the Jews.

Fear, violence and death on the streets.

Already by 1936 the Nazi regime perpetrated random acts of violence on the streets, ruthlessly despatched opponents and instilled a climate of fear, some part of which we encounter directly through the lives of the characters in 'Garden of Beasts'...

Paul Schumann has been found lodgings with Kathe Richter, and encounters a woman who used to be a teacher. Her crime – the incident that saw her thrown out of her job and ejected from her profession – was to tell her students of her respect for the courage of Goethe in refusing to let his son fight in a war. Her pacifist views, and her association with a man, a journalist who spoke his mind and paid for that with his life, means that the apparatus of the state have her marked out. Her life is lived not knowing when the Gestapo will come calling for her, but knowing that they will and once taken by them she might never be seen alive again.

Willi Kohl, the time-served policeman, holds to his own beliefs.
He saves a Jewish baker from being taken into custody by giving Gestapo officer Paul Krauss a false name for him, implying the man may be related to SD Leader Heydrich, playing on the fear instilled in everyone by the Nazi regime. He knows even a Gestapo officer can suffer severe consequences for upsetting or falling foul of those who run the Nazi party.

Willi’s own son is being singled out at school. One of the few who had not yet voluntarily joined the Hitler Youth he was forced to take the role of Jew in the playgound game of Aryan versus Jew. Events provide the ideal opportunity for Willi to protect his son as he drafts in the local Hitler Youth on an assignment to discover the restaurant frequented by the victim of the shooting in Dresden Ally. He confides in the ringleader that his son has all along been covertly engaged in such vital investigations and is to be looked after. A ruse that works, but only until the time when membership of the Hitler Youth becomes compulsory.

Finally we are introduced to the two teenage Fischer brothers. Their parents, known pacifists and avowed anti-Nazis, had gone to London to a conference and would not be allowed back. The boys survived on starvation rations and, rather than wait their fate at the hands of the Gestapo, planned to escape to Switzerland with the help of their friend Unger. Discovered en route, the boys, with their Jewishness and pacifist family background, are taken into custody to be used as the state saw fit. Unger is summarily shot - the price to pay for his subversive behaviour in helping them.


Beyond the story in 'Garden of Beasts' there was a further price to pay...
…any threat from those who would undermine the Fuhrer would not be tolerated. A task that Himmler undertook and enforced with some vigour – the SS, the Gestapo and the Brown shirts of the SA on the street given power to ensure that every decree was enforced and suspected Communists, pacifists, dissenters and violators checked, questioned, fined, imprisoned. Threats, intimidation, gratuitous violence, even death, were meted out in equal measure – until November 9th 1938, Kristallnacht, when in one night violent retribution was visited on all the Jewish population that remained in Germany, and their ultimate fate was settled.